Gmail spam filter: Here’s how Google is using AI to block up to 100m spam emails per day

Gmail’s spam filter does a pretty good job by default. As a result, most of us with reasonably manageable incoming email tend to live with the few bits of spam that make their way into our inbox. Thanks, Google!

However, with a little bit of effort, you can get rid of spam in Gmail completely and get rid of all of those rude intrusions into your email fortress of solitude.

To begin with, you can deal with individual emails and senders by marking them as spam. To do this, open the offending message in Gmail and click on the three dots on the top right-hand side of the message.

From this menu, you’ll have the option of blocking the sender or reporting the message as spam.

Even if the odd spam email is not a problem for you, by telling Gmail what you don’t want to see any more of you’ll help them to make their built-in spam filter work that much better.

Step by step: How to filter messages in Gmail

If you have low priority mail or mail from recipients that are just for reference – or items that you want to deal with at the end of your day – you can filter messages so that they automatically get marked with a certain label.

To do this, you’ll need to type the name of the sender into the search bar in Gmail. On the right-hand side of the search bar, there’ll now be a down arrow click on it, and it will bring up a menu of advanced options.

From there you can create a filter as simple as just a sender to a filter that finds messages from a sender with the words “free money” in it that was sent in the last week and doesn’t have the words “don’t filter me” in it.

Once you’re happy with the search criteria, click on “create filter”. Then you’ll see a Gmail menu where you can decide what you want to do with messages that meet the search criteria.

In this instance, we’ll select “apply label” and select a label or create a new one if it doesn’t already exist.

TensorFlow is changing the way we block spam

Google announced last month that they’ve started using TensorFlow, their machine learning framework to assist with the war on spam. The new filters have reportedly resulted in a 100 million additional messages being blocked as spam daily.

That’s an additional one spam message per 10 users, which is really a testament to how good Google already was at blocking spam. Neil Kumaran, the manager of Counter Abuse Technology at Google, explains:

“Getting the last bit of incremental spam is increasingly hard, but TensorFlow has been great for closing that gap.”

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